Currently, there is an interest on the part of manufacturing concerns in providing customers with a greater variety of selectable attributes of purchased goods. However, this must be done without unduly extending the interval between the time at which an order is placed, and the good delivered. Keeping large inventories of products with all the possible combinations of selectable attributes is not a good solution to the problem for at least the following reasons: (1) it may be difficult to accurately forecast user demand for particular combinations of attributes (this is especially problematic in the case of products having a finite shelf life) and (2) large inventories engender a commensurate tax burden. To address the interest, manufacturers are striving to develop more efficient manufacturing systems for building products to order.
One aspect of manufacturing systems that must be addressed is the printing of packaging labels and other printed articles which are dependent on the specific set of attributes which has been selected for a given product.
In conventional packaging operations, labels which all contain the same printed matter, are typically printed in bulk for application to products and/or product packaging. In printing duplicate labels in large quantities, printing or finishing (e.g., cutting or coating) errors increase costs but are not problematic for the overall manufacturing system. However, if each label is customized for a particular product order, or if there is a small set of identical labels corresponding to a product order, then print errors can cause delays in other packaging processes that use the printed labels, and delays in shipping product.
In industrial settings, labels are usually printed from label stock that comes in the form of a web. Producing the labels, generally involves feeding the web through two or more separate web fed system (e.g., a print line, and a cut and coat line). Setting up each web fed system requires threading a length (known as a ‘leader’) of the web manually, in order to engage the web in a feed mechanism. The leader will not be fully processed by the web fed system and is therefore unuseable. This loss of a small number of labels on the leader portion is acceptable if mass quantities of duplicate labels are being produced. However, if the label is used in a build-to-order manufacturing system in which each label is intended for a specific order, then this loss of labels in the leader portion is not acceptable.
Additionally, in the operation of a printer or printed material coating, and cutting line some errors will unavoidably occur. This is problematic for an order specific printed material generating system, in which each label may be customized.
Depending on the size of label required, labels can be printed in more than one column on a web. Labels may be grouped in orders, which have varying lengths. Due to the differing lengths an arrangement of orders on the web in an ad hoc sequence can result in excessive white space, which is tantamount to waste.
Further, in a highly automated system for producing labels, it is desirable to allow the layout of labels to be changed without having to rewrite programs in which formatting information is coded.
What is needed is a method and apparatus for generating order specific printed materials in a high volume production environment.